PT-PT / PT-BR
Two Portugueses,one line in the menu.
Dictation apps list Portuguese once. Portugal and Brazil use different words, conjugate differently and put pronouns in different places, so a single entry in a language menu is already the wrong answer for one of the two. Here is the difference in real sentences, why speech models lean Brazilian, and a test you can run on any tool in under a minute.
The short answer
European and Brazilian Portuguese are two written standards of one language. Vocabulary, verb forms, pronoun placement and some spelling all differ. A tool offering only Portuguese has already chosen a side, and it almost always chose Brazilian. Ask two things of it: that it lets you pick which Portuguese you speak, and that it does not rewrite your forms after it has heard them correctly.
The difference, in full
The same sentence, written two ways.
Neither column is a mistake. Each is correct where it is spoken and out of place where it is not. When dictation hands you the other column it has not made a typo, it has written in a standard that is not yours.
| The situation | Portugal | Brazil |
|---|---|---|
| Calling someone | Vou ligar-te do telemóvel. | Vou te ligar do celular. |
| A task in progress | Estou a trabalhar nisso agora. | Estou trabalhando nisso agora. |
| Getting to the office | Apanha o autocarro para o escritório. | Pegue o ônibus para o escritório. |
| Asking for a document | Envia-me o ficheiro, por favor. | Me envia o arquivo, por favor. |
| The computer froze | O ecrã bloqueou. | A tela travou. |
| Running late | O comboio está atrasado. | O trem está atrasado. |
| The first meal | Já tomaste o pequeno-almoço? | Você já tomou café da manhã? |
| Booking a meeting | A equipa reúne-se às três. | A equipe se reúne às três. |
Four kinds of difference are visible above. Vocabulary (telemóvel, ficheiro, ecrã). The progressive: estou a trabalhar against estou trabalhando. Where the pronoun goes: ligar-te against te ligar. And which second person you address a colleague with.
Why it happens
The tool is not broken. It was trained somewhere.
Most of the training audio is Brazilian
Brazil has roughly twenty times the speakers of Portugal, and public speech datasets follow the population. Inside the single label Portuguese, European Portuguese is a minority accent. Recognition quality follows the data, which is why one tool can feel sharp in São Paulo and clumsy in Porto.
European Portuguese swallows its vowels
Unstressed vowels in European Portuguese reduce to almost nothing, so words run together in ways a model tuned on the more open Brazilian vowels does not expect. That is a documented property of the accent, not careless speech. Telling Portuguese speakers to enunciate is a workaround, not a fix.
Most software exposes one Portuguese
The language tags have existed for decades: pt-PT and pt-BR. Plenty of products still show a single Portuguese row, which means the decision was made in the code, without the person speaking. If a tool never asks, assume it picked Brazilian.
The cleanup pass can undo a correct transcript
Modern dictation tools run a second model over the raw transcript to punctuate and tidy it. Unless that pass knows which standard you write in, it reads your correct European forms as errors and helpfully rewrites estou a fazer into estou fazendo. The microphone heard you right and the text is still wrong.
The first two belong to whoever trains the acoustic models, and no small team is going to out-train them. The last two are product decisions, which means somebody chose not to make them.
One minute
How to find out what your tool actually does.
This works on any dictation tool, including the one built into your Mac and the one you already pay for. Say each sentence out loud in your own Portuguese and read what lands. You are not measuring accuracy here. You are checking whether the tool respects the standard you write in.
- 01
Look at the setting first
Open the language setting and see what it offers. Two separate entries, European and Brazilian Portuguese, means somebody thought about this. A single Portuguese row means the choice was made without you, and the rest of the test shows which way it went.
- 02
Test the progressive
Say a sentence with an action in progress: Estou a preparar o relatório, or Estou preparando o relatório, whichever is yours. If it comes back as the other one, the tool is rewriting your grammar rather than transcribing it.
- 03
Test the vocabulary
Say a sentence with a word that splits cleanly down the middle: Deixei o telemóvel em casa, or Deixei o celular em casa. Same test, different layer. This one usually fails during transcription rather than cleanup, which tells you the tool is pointed at the wrong Portuguese entirely.
- 04
Test the pronoun
Say Envia-me o ficheiro, or Me envia o arquivo. Pronoun placement is the first thing an over-eager cleanup pass reaches for, because both forms are grammatical somewhere and it cannot tell which somewhere you live in.
- 05
Test the English in the middle
Say a real work sentence with English in it: Preciso de fazer deploy antes da reunião. Three outcomes are possible. The English word arrives as Portuguese nonsense, the whole sentence flips to English, or it lands intact. Only the third is usable if you work in two languages at once.
Five sentences, under a minute. If a tool fails steps two, three and four, no accuracy figure on its home page is about you.
What we built
Which Portuguese is a question, not a checkbox.
The first time Sonira runs it asks which Portuguese you speak, and the two cards carry their own words: comboio, telemóvel, casa de banho on one, trem, celular, banheiro on the other. You pick once, by recognising your own language on the card, and never think about it again.
That answer then travels with the text. The pass that punctuates and tidies your transcript is explicitly forbidden from touching your variant or your register: equipa never becomes equipe, manda-me never becomes me envie, and a spoken tá is never promoted to está. English terms dropped into a Portuguese sentence stay English.
What this does not do is fix the acoustic model. European Portuguese is still recognised by an industry model trained mostly on Brazilian audio, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can control is that nothing after the microphone works against the way you speak.
Honest note: the current public build is the dictation core, with European and Brazilian Portuguese selectable. The most recent Portuguese work, and read-aloud, ship in the next public build.
Hold a key. Speak. The words land where the cursor is.
Code-switching
The English in the middle of your Portuguese.
Real work sentences are not monolingual. Preciso de fazer deploy do branch antes da daily. Manda-me o link do meeting. Amanhã faço o follow-up. Every office in Lisbon and São Paulo talks like this, and no dictation demo is ever recorded like this.
A tool pinned to one language turns those English words into Portuguese nonsense. A tool with no language set at all often flips the whole sentence into English, which is worse, because it reads fluently and you only notice on the reread. Holding two languages inside one sentence is the harder engineering problem, and it is the one that decides whether dictation survives your actual job.
If you only test one thing
Dictate one sentence from your own work, with the English terms your team really uses. It tells you more than any benchmark on any pricing page.
Good to know
Questions, answered.
- 01What is the difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese in dictation?
- Vocabulary, verb forms, pronoun placement and some spelling. Telemóvel or celular, estou a fazer or estou fazendo, envia-me or me envia. Both are correct Portuguese and only one of them is yours, so a tool offering a single Portuguese entry is writing in the wrong standard for a large share of the people using it.
- 02Can one dictation app handle both?
- Yes, if it treats them as two choices rather than one language. The acoustic model is shared, the written standard is not. The work is in letting you choose, and then respecting that choice at every step that touches the text afterwards.
- 03Why does European Portuguese produce more recognition errors?
- Two reasons. Most Portuguese training audio is Brazilian, because Brazil has around twenty times the speakers. And European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels heavily, which makes word boundaries harder for a model that expects the more open Brazilian vowels.
- 04Does picking pt-PT instead of pt-BR actually change anything?
- It should change two things: transcription is biased toward the right vocabulary, and the cleanup pass afterwards knows not to convert your forms. If a tool exposes the setting and your grammar still gets rewritten, only the first half was implemented.
- 05Can I mix English words into a Portuguese sentence?
- You should be able to, since that is how most technical and office work is actually spoken. Test it before trusting it. Dictate a sentence with two or three English terms and check that they arrive in English while the Portuguese around them stays Portuguese.
- 06Which Portuguese does Sonira use?
- The one you pick. Sonira asks on first run and lists European and Brazilian Portuguese as separate options in settings, and the cleanup step is instructed never to convert between them or to formalise how you speak. Free while we are in beta.
Dictate in your Portuguese.
Free while we're in beta.
Want the whole picture? Read the Portuguese dictation guide.
New to dictation? Start with the Mac guide.